The dust diaries Book

In 1973, the SPCK published God's Irregular: Arthur Shearly Cripps, A Rhodesian Epic, by Douglas Steere, recounting the life of the poet and Mashonaland-based Anglican - but very independent - missionary. Twenty-four years later, Owen Sheers looked out a copy in his father's study after Cripps's name came up in a family conversation. After reading this biography of his relative - Cripps was his grandmother's uncle - Sheers found that although he now knew the shape of Cripps' life, "there are pieces missing. Triggers and gaps in the story", and that Cripps is "strangely absent".

Sheers' own book, by contrast, is an intimate and subjective exploration of the same man, who lived as an ascetic in a thatched hut and championed the rights of Africans. The work is part travelogue, as Sheers goes out into the world to follow in Cripps' footsteps, and part novel, with Sheers turning inward to imagine not just the contours of his main subject's own life, but the inner feelings of other, contrasting, characters: these include the poet Cullen Gouldsbury, who served as District Officer in North Rhodesia, and the professional soldier and intelligence officer Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen.

Sheers's literary style is meditative and poetic - at times, ponderously so, while the meandering structure verges on the languid. However, Sheers introduces a Citizen Kane-like investigative element that is serviceable as a narrative propellant: a reference in Steere's book to "an undocumented but persistent rumour of a love affair with a girl which might have changed Cripps' earlier drawing towards the celibate life." Sheers himself hears rumours of a granddaughter, and the unfolding of this story is interweaved with stories about Cripps' later life in Rhodesia (there's also a prologue in Zanzibar, where Cripps meets his friend Frank Weston - I reviewed a biography of Weston previously).

Although much of the book is imaginative and perhaps speculative, it does have merit as a source: Sheers consults Cripps papers at Oxford, and in Zimbabwe he encounters several people who knew him. These include Leonard Mamvura, who cared for Cripps in his later years, and Thomas Shonhe, who was present at the very end of his life. Sheers's description of a religious celebration at Cripps's grave gives us a sense of how the man lives on in memory (Cripps' name is also memorialized in Zimbabwe through a popular fundraising book produced by his children's home, entitled The Shearly Cripps Recipe Diary).

There's also an interesting detail when Sheers visits Zimbabwe's National Archives to read Cripps' 1927 book An Africa for Africans. Inside the archive's copy he finds a typewritten note dated 1950, in which Cripps (dictating - he was blind by this time) repudiates his book's support for a policy of segregation to protect Africans' interests: "...I am thankful for Segregation as planned by the Morris-Carter Commission for opening the way for Africans to purchase plots of land but I do not believe that Segregation is a righteous policy for a British Colony. Can it be a right policy for Christian people? Certainly not!"